Open Stack

Openstack/Cinder has a wealth of storage drivers to talk to different
storage subsystems, which is great for users of openstack.  However, it
would be even greater if this same functionality could be leveraged
outside of openstack/cinder.  So that other projects don't need to
duplicate the same functionality when trying to talk to hardware.


When looking at cinder and asking around[1] about how one could
potentially do this I find out that is there is quite a bit of coupling
with openstack, like:

* The NFS driver is initialized with knowledge about whether any volumes
exist in the database or not, and if not, can trigger certain behavior
to set permissions, etc.  This means that something other than the
cinder-volume service needs to mimic the right behavior if using this
driver.

* The LVM driver touches the database when creating a backup of a volume
(many drivers do), and when managing a volume (importing an existing
external LV to use as a Cinder volume).

* A few drivers (GPFS, others?) touch the db when managing consistency
groups.

* EMC, Hitachi, and IBM NFS drivers touch the db when creating/deleting
snapshots.


Am I the only one that thinks this would be useful?  What ideas do
people have for making the cinder drivers stand alone, so that everyone
could benefit from this great body of work?

Thanks,
Tony

[1] Special thanks to Eric Harney for the examples of coupling